44 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
"We should now recommend him to take the train to the station nearest 
to Sapperton Tunnel, as this will enable him to examine the Puller's 
Earth which was cut through during the excavations for the tunnel, 
and which may still be seen on the spoil banks adjacent. We have 
not said much at present about two very important formations which 
lie between the Bradford clay and the Fuller's Earth, viz., the Great 
Oolite and Stonesfield slate, because we propose to dwell more in detail 
upon them when we describe the district in Gloucestershire where they 
are most largely developed, and can be studied with most advantage. 
As the Bradford clay is intimately connected with the Great Oolite, so 
is the Fuller's Earth with the Inferior; the majority of the fossils pre- 
vailing in the Oolite below, and a few passing upwards into that above. 
It is very rarely that the argillaceous band appears in situ, its presence 
being only indicated (like the upper lias), especially on some of the' 
higher escarpments of the Cotswolds, by the soft, wet nature of the 
ground, and the bursting out of copious springs. A few fossils, chiefly 
shells, have been obtained at Cubberly, near Cheltenham ; but Sapper- 
ton is the richest locality. Its thickness in this district averages from 
thirty to seventy feet, and the moat abundant fossils are Modiola, 
Ostrea, and Terebratulfe. From this point the student should make the 
best of his way to Minchinhampton Common, where the Great Oolite has 
been long quarried, and from whence some of the finest and most 
beautiful of its fossils have been obtained. We should advise him by 
all means to pay a visit to the valuable and instructive collection made 
by Mr. Lycett at that village, to whom palteontologists are indebted 
for the discovery and investigation of many new forms of marine animal 
life (chiefly moUusks) which inhabited the sea during this portion of 
the Oolitic period.* Abundant and varied as these remains are, it is 
a remarkable fact that there are no traces of any higher order of 
animals, either terrestrial, fluviatile, or marine, which would seem to 
imj)ly that land was far distant, although the sea was probably a shallow 
one and liable to strong and varying currents. The thickness of the whole 
of the Great Oolite in the district under review does not exceed 140 feet, 
the upper portion consisting of several beds of hard limestone and marl, 
containing the remnants, as it were, of a marine fauna, which abounds 
• The majority of these are described and figured by Messrs. Lycett and Morris, 
in the "Memoirs of the Palaaontograpkical Society," Part III., 1800, and Part 
IV., 1853. 
